Trailer Hitch Installation - 2015 Honda Odyssey - Hidden Hitch

How to Install a Trailer Hitch on a 2015 Honda Odyssey

Today, on this 2015 Honda Odyssey, we're going to show you the hidden hitch, Class 3, 2-inch receiver hitch, Part Number 87479. This is what the hitch looks like when it's installed on our Odyssey. Now you will notice that it does sit below the bumper, and also you can see the receiver and the crossbar. Let's take a closer look at the receiver part now. On the very end of the collar here, it has a nice rounded finish to it. Then go into the 2-inch opening here, you'll notice that there's 2 holes.

This hole here is 5/8 diameter for a Class 3 hitch pin or your favorite locking hitch pin. The smaller diameter hole here is for a J-pin stabilization pin. That's for accessories that go into your hitch that do not have their own anti-rattle device. This plate here for the safety chains has a little more cleaner appearance than a simple loop on the bottom. A cross tube goes into our frame bracket right here where it reaches up into the frame of the vehicle. From there, it uses existing holes so there's no drilling required with this hitch.

It's actually fairly easy to install. Now the tongue weight on our hitch is going to be 675 pounds, which is the weight that pushes down on the ball, and the gross trailer weight's going to be 4,500 pounds. When you add a weight distribution assembly, the gross trailer weight goes up to 5,000 pounds, and the tongue weight goes up to 675 pounds. Now always double check your owner's manual to make sure your vehicle is rated 00:01:22 for these kind of capacities. Next, we'll go ahead and give you some measurements to help you out in selecting some accessories such a ball mount, a bicycle rack, or a cargo carrier. From top of receiver opening down to the ground will be about 13 inches.

From the center of the hitch pin hole to the outside edge of the bumper will be about 6-3/4 inches. All right, now we'll go ahead and show you how we installed the hitch. We'll start off with the passenger side and lower the exhaust. We'll spray it down with some lubricant, and then we'll go ahead and pry off the rubber hanger. On our driver's side, we need to remove this panel.

They'll be 3 plastic fasteners on the outside edge, plus a couple more on the back side. To remove the plastic fastener, I'll take a flat blade screwdriver, pop open the center, and you can pull off the rivet. Sometimes, you'll have to pry it out as well. All right, some vehicles will have this extra trim panel here, and one of the fasteners is hidden behind it, so we need to go ahead and loosen this up by taking out these 2 screws with a Phillips screwdriver. Inaudible 00:02:29 has a bolt we have to remove using a 10 mm socket. Now there's another 10 mm bolt right here that we have to remove and 1 final bolt right here using a Phillips head screwdriver. All right, now we can go ahead and take this panel down. Now this is an optional part here. You can leave this off after you have the hitch installed or you can put it back on. Next up, I'm getting our vehicle ready because we need to clean up the 3 holes that have threads in them. Once again, we'll use the spray lubricant on them, and we'll use a tube brush to help clean out the threads. On a newer vehicle, this is not much of a problem, but the older a vehicle gets, the more dust and debris will get inside. Take one of the hitch bolts and make sure they thread in okay. This is our driver side's done. We'll repeat the same thing over on the passenger side. Our van's ready. Let's go ahead and get our hitch ready. To do that, we need to take these plates and put them on the top of the hitch. While we're here, let's show you how the hardware works. This is our hitch bolt we tested earlier. This is a connical 00:03:44 tooth washer. Always make sure your teeth goes up towards the hitch, and everything will attach to the van in this fashion. Now the hardware's going to be the same for all 6 holes. We'll tape these in place to make it a little easier when we put it up there. I'm just going to use some plain old packing tape. Now you notice on the end of the hitch going towards the front there's 2 holes. We want to use this one. This one's typically used on older vehicles. At this point, we can go ahead and put our hitch up into place. You definitely want to get an extra set of hands to help hold it up and put it in place. All right, now with 1 bolt on each side holding up the hitch, we'll loosely install the rest of our hardware. With our hardware loose, we can go ahead and move our plates if we want to, and this one here I like to rotate it so it doesn't interfere with this bracket. All right, we're done with our passenger side. One more time over on our driver's side. Now we can go ahead and tighten down the bolts using a 19 mm socket, and then we'll torque the bolts down as specified in the instructions. Back to our panel here. This is optional if you want to put this up. Otherwise, you can put the mud flap back into place. If you want to put this back up, all you've got to do is make a small modification to this bolt hole right here. Just elongate it this way, and there'll be enough clearance for it to go into place. It still will be tight, but it'll work. Again, if you choose to, we'll go ahead and put our panel back up into place. Then you can reassemble the mud flap. Okay, with that hole made a little bit oblong, that gives us a little wiggle room to move our plastic around and we can reinstall the fasteners. Back over to the passenger side, we'll go ahead and reinstall the exhaust back onto its rubber hanger. With that we're finished for an install of the hidden hitch, Class 3, 2-inch receiver hitch, Part Number 87479 on this 2015 Honda Odyssey.

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